Good post, Bowser. I've been remiss to not respond yet to your request for book recommendations, but it looks like you've picked well. I've read "Cobra II" and found it excellent. Woodward's "Plan of Attack" was pretty good too.

I recently read "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and recommend it highly. It fleshes out the story of the first phase of the US occupation of Iraq under viceroy Bremer, and it's fascinating, if also sickening; and credible because it's consistent with all we've learned about that fiasco and conforms to the same high standards of journalism of the rest of the books you describe.

Profile of a typical staffer of the Coalition Provisional Authority: Early 20s, formerly a low-level staffer or intern in the office of a connected Republican politician. Picked entirely for political loyalty. It wasn't so much that competency wasn't considered, as that it was often considered a negative, since experts have a tendency to disagree with RightWing dogma. The kids typically signed up for a 3-month "tour of duty" before moving on to the Bush 2004 reelection campaign (try not to think too much about Republican political operatives trained in a war zone and what it says about Republican ambition).

Another category of CPA Republican hack was the wealthy donor rewarded with a powerful position in Iraq. One such was a stockbroker put in charge of all of Iraq's state-owned industry, whose zealous mission it was to privatize all the industry in 30 days, to "wean the Iraqi people off of the idea that the government will take care of them". Staggering cluelessness, isn't it? To most Iraqis, life consisted of working where a Baath Party official said to work, and nobody with half a brain could imagine them sitting around considering the ideological implications of how they put bread on the table.

But the icing on the cake: This guy was informed that his scheme was a blatant violation of the Hague Conventions, which stipulate that a conqueror may not sell off the assets of the conquered nation, to which his reply was simply (paraphrasing) "eff 'em"--he knew that the Bush Regime would provide plenty of cover by simply denying the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the various tribunals to consider allegations of war crimes against Americans. The only reason he didn't end up trying to put his scheme into action was actually inspecting the factories and offices and discovering that they were uniformly broken-down pieces of shit that nobody in their right mind would purchase even at fire-sale prices. Oops.

You heard about the planeloads of pallets of shrink-wrapped $100s flown into Baghdad straight from the US Mint, and the missing ~$8 billion. Chandrasekaran shows where it went: Handed out in units of duffel bags, one duffel bag holding a nice round $1 million in fresh shrink-wrapped hundreds. If you were politically-connected you were awash in cash; if you weren't politically connected, your by-the-book purchase requisitions for ordinary things like desks and office supplies were routinely denied. You know damn well a lot of loyal Republicans made a shitpot of money spending a few months in Iraq.

As I said, I found the book highly credible; and as you said, no RightWinger will ever read it, but every RightWinger will be certain to the depths of his cramped little soul that it's an utter pack of lies fabricated by those evil Damn Lib'rals.

I don't think there's any cure for Wingerism, Bowser. Best we can do is manage the disease, learn to live with it, and find useful roles in society for its sufferers. If we take precautions while engaging Wingers in social intercourse, there's little risk of infection; think of GOP as the political equivalent of HIV.